Category Archives: Games

I added an enemy/bonus pointer (the red thing floating around the player) which shows you the direction of the nearest enemy or, if not available, the nearest bonus item. You already have a radar, but especially at the end of the level it makes is much easier to find what is left.

Since my PC is too slow for most game-capturing software (Core2Duo E7200/Radeon HD5700) while running Zerocron, I finally seem to have found a nice and free open source alternative: Open Broadcaster Software (OBS).

All others I tried either were too CPU-hungry and/or had trouble recording sound.

OBS also didn´t perform so good out of the box, I first had to tweak the settings a bit. Basically I changed the H264-encoding to “ultrafast” with medium quality, resulting in low-cpu and hdd-usage. In case you have the same problem, I thought I´d share my settings with you, relevant stuff is marked yellow. Screenshots are from OBS Version 0.657b.

Today I tweaked Zerocrons audio-effects, it sounds more balanced now and if there´s a lot shooting and explosions simultaneously there is no more acoustic inferno. Also internally, I updated all audio-functions to Game Makers new audio-system.

After some betatesting (still not much feedback, though) I´m now working on a more universal gamepad support. It seems older controllers work fine with the existing code, but not Xbox compatible ones. But the Xbox compatible functions don´t support the old joypads – so I guess I have to combine both.

Finally, I think it´s time for a closed beta of Zerocron, or else I´ll get stuck in endlessy tweaking the game.

Also I decided to release it as freeware / donationware, and somewhen sell a collectors edition in physical form. Promoting the game, creating extensive videos or trying to get it greenlit on steam really bores me to death, thus killing my motivation, even if it´s the right way to make a game successfull. But I don´t think there´s much money to be made with a simple shoot em up these days anyway ;).

Known things to do:

Extro is missing

More music would be nice

Sound effects and volume need finetuning

Bosses may be to easy since my last changes

Credit roll is boring and will be replaced

Xbox-Controller support missing

Highscore leaderboard

Known Bugs:

Joypad detections slows game down for some seconds after starting

Some backgrounds have a display bug at the bottom

As an easteregg, I wanted to include the space station of Environmental Station Alpha as a background image, but sadly got no reply by it´s author, Hempuli. So I removed it and replaced it with incredible pictures of Pluto (thank you, Nasa)!

Since my PC is still to slow for screengrabbing-software, here a new preview, filmed with my camera: